Con Man Pleads Guilty to Fraud in Grenfell Tower Fire

LONDON — A 52-year-old con man with 28 convictions pleaded guilty to fraud on Thursday for having tried to collect 12,500 pounds, or about $16,000, in financial assistance by falsely claiming that his family had died in the Grenfell Tower fire in London.

Anh Nhu Nguyen, a Vietnamese man who lives in southeastern London, posed as a survivor for at least two weeks after the fire on June 14 that killed at least 80 people. He said that his wife and son had perished in the blaze and that he had lost all of his “worldly possessions.”

After registering at a relief center for disaster victims in June, Mr. Nguyen was given free accommodation worth more than $3,000 at a nearby Holiday Inn as well as food, electrical goods and money from various charity funds.

After the fire, he gave extensive interviews to several news organizations claiming that he had become separated from his wife and 12-year-old son as they tried to escape from the tower’s 15th floor through a smoke-filled stairwell. He said that when he tried to go back and find them, he had been stopped by firefighters.

Mr. Nguyen’s story started to unravel when he tried to make further claims at a different relief center, providing a series of apartment numbers that were registered under different names.

He also tried to claim extra money to fly relatives from Hong Kong to London for what he said was his son’s funeral.

Mr. Nguyen was arrested on June 28, two days after Prince Charles’s visit, on suspicion of fraud. On Thursday he appeared at London’s Southwark Crown Court and pleaded guilty to two counts of fraud by false representation and one count of making a false statement to obtain a passport. He will be sentenced on Dec 15.

“This is a case of fraud, but one which has a contemptible element to it, succeeding in receiving money out of the misery and tragedy of people who, unlike this defendant, genuinely suffered because of this terrible fire,” Judge Philip Bartle said during the hearing.

The police have investigated at least eight cases of fraud relating to people who have claimed money from various Grenfell fire relief funds. A woman was charged with six counts of fraud in September, and several instances of theft were reported from lower-level flats in the building.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: Con Man Tried to Profit by Pretending Kin Died in London Fire. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe